Case Number 01561

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX

The Charge

"He can be terrible and he can be mean and he can be right...You don't
judge the colonel like an ordinary man." -- The Photojournalist (Dennis
Hopper)

Opening Statement

Once upon a time, in an age when men did not know any better (unlike today,
of course), there was a war. Men went into a jungle to tame what they thought
was a wilderness, only to discover the beasts within themselves. After much
money, much time, and too much pain, they retreated and presented their findings
to the public. Years later, they returned to that place, saw what they had done,
and tried to judge again with a fresh perspective.

Of course, I'm talking about Apocalypse Now. You thought I was
talking about Vietnam, didn't you?

Facts of the Case

A fever dream: palm trees enveloped in yellow dust, eaten by pulsing fire.
Helicopters nose forward like angry wasps. It is a world turned upside down.
Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) waits for an enemy, cracks the mirror in his fury
not to face himself. He tells this story as a confession, an apology in the
classic sense: merely an explanation. It is a confession for two men, both
assassins. "What do you call it when the assassins accuse the
assassin?" asks the enigmatic Colonel Kurtz, condemned by his former
masters when "his methods became unsound." Both men judge each other,
judge the world -- and find it wanting.

The Evidence

Nearly everyone who tries to talk about Apocalypse Now must account
for its fearsome scale. Few films have tried to tackle the subject of war so
ambitiously. Sure, some films have staged more elaborate battle sequences,
technical marvels of realism. Some films have focused more intimately on the
psychological trauma of war. But there has always been a double irony to Francis
Ford Coppola's own remarks about Apocalypse Now, seen at the time he made
them (on the film's premiere at Cannes in 1979): "My film is not about
Vietnam. My film is Vietnam. It's what it was really like." And in a
sense, he was right: Apocalypse Now was an obsessive, destructive, costly
disaster when made. You only have to glance at the marvelous 1991 documentary
Hearts of Darkness to know that.

But that is altogether too obvious. Apocalypse Now is also not a film
about war. It is war: staging itself as final judgment beyond the fraying edges
of out Vietnam history, our flirtations with colonialism. It is a film about
apocalypse.

Odd how few critics seem much interested in this fact, their nervousness
about the film's eschatological implications revealed by their very lack of
attention, their obsession with the real Vietnam War and its lack of closure. No
one doubts that Apocalypse Now is not a real chronicle of Vietnam: it is
far too stylized and dreamlike, its images (shot with surreal softness by
Vittorio Storaro) folding over one another and woven with frequent dissolves.
Watch Willard and Chief (Albert Hall) on the boat as they push upriver toward
Cambodia, their bodies shadowed in grey like some black and white movie, while
the plants along the shore burst out at the screen in bright green. Watch the
drifting layers of light as Willard slips past Do Lung Bridge.

Holding this dream together is the interior monologue of Willard (written
with dry cynicism by Vietnam journalist Michael Herr). He has been sent by his
masters (the U.S. Army, though he calls them a "corporation," as if to
stress their bureaucratic detachment) to issue judgment on the seemingly mad
Colonel Kurtz, who has broken from the pack to form his own empire in the wilds
of Cambodia. Of course, empire builders cannot tolerate competition, and he must
be eliminated. He is a rogue right out of Paradise Lost: the chosen one,
the bringer of light to the jungle, who has chosen instead to rule in Hell.
"Out there with these natives," says the general (G.D. Spradlin) who
hands Willard his orders, "it must be a temptation to be God."

Only one God at a time, please: Kurtz once ran an operation for the military
named "Archangel," and now the airstrike called in to finish him off
at his compound (bordered by fires and giant crosses) is dubbed
"Almighty." And only one God is allowed to call for an apocalypse:
Kurtz's final message, scrawled on his manifesto but destined to be ignored by
the high command is "Drop the Bomb! Exterminate them all!" But the God
is charge is a hollow one, more apt to end the war "not with a bang but a
whimper" (as Kurtz quotes from Eliot's "The Hollow Men"). Nobody
is in charge of this war. Nobody is willing to pass judgment from on high. And
those who are left to judge, in the field, are more apt to follow their
appetites and desires than anything else.

Is there a plan to this apocalypse? We never see one. Instead, Colonel
Kilgore (Robert Duvall) captures territory in order to indulge his penchant for
surfing. Men treated to a USO show with Playboy bunnies run amok. In Coppola's
newly reedited Apocalypse Now Redux, several added scenes enhance the
comic elements of these sequences: Kilgore is revealed as more of a buffoon than
a threat when Willard steals his surfboard (issuing what little judgment and
ironic punishment is within his power), and the bunnies are "bought"
by Willard (from a medevac crew that seems rife with gay stereotypes -- one
character refers to himself as a "working girl") for the sexual
pleasure of his boat crew. The scenes are all rather silly, but perhaps their
tendency to make Willard come across as less serious -- and more fallible --
adds a whole new set of problems to his role as judge.

Such fallible judgment is addressed in a long added sequence (about 25
minutes) set at a French plantation. One of two new scenes more closely
addressing the history of American colonialism (the other involves Kurtz
reading, in a remarkably rational tone and in broad daylight -- counter to his
other appearances in the film -- to children from an issue of Time on the
corporate selling of the war), the sequence involves an uncomfortable dinner
party, during which the stubborn French, hanging on to the last vestiges of
their own colonial pretensions, tell a joke about eating a passing angel
(resisting the message of coming apocalypse?) and argue in circles about
political labels. Willard is distracted briefly by an opium pipe and a lovely
widow (Ain't It Cool News Talkbackers: start your jokes about Willard
"having a beer and cheeting [sic] on his wife" now) while some
overcooked, melodramatic music plays (the electronic score of the film from
Carmine Coppola sounds rather dated these days).

The new material, which adds nearly 50 minutes to the film's already
grandiose running time, tends to be inconsistent in tone, and was better removed
from the film in its original run. But it does make the movie seem less pompous,
revealing, if only in the awkwardly staged (and unfunny) humor of the medevac
camp (Coppola has never had a steady hand with overt comedy -- he is better when
he keeps the satire dry) and the desperate posturing of the French plantation
owners, the more human side of the film. To see Kurtz calmly read to children
allows us to reevaluate the complexity of his character. Of course, so much of
our fascination with Kurtz is due to the perfectly measured performance of
Marlon Brando: watch the way he moves in and out of the light and punctuates his
seemingly disordered ramblings with small gestures. This is a performance that,
in spite of the scope of Kurtz's (and the film's) ambitions, works all the
better on the intimate scale of a television screen. In this way, Kurtz's role
as reluctant martyr, tacitly authorizing Willard to butcher him at the climax
(and thus assuring that only Kurtz is fit to ultimately judge Kurtz), takes on
new resonance. If Kurtz is unsound, it is only because he has chosen to be:
better to be mad by choice, then mad at the behest of others. Only in this way
can you have some control over the chaos.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

While the newly remastered print looks stunning (showing only the requisite
softness due to age), thanks to a complete reworking of its Technicolor
elements, and the newly added scenes to this expanded version of the film are
incorporated smoothly, Paramount has chosen to add virtually no extra content to
this disc. An ideal package would have been to offer this film with Hearts of
Darkness (like Warner Brothers licensed the PBS Citizen Kane
documentary to include with that film) and, of course, a Coppola commentary
track (he's still probably recovering from the marathon Godfather
commentaries), the least Paramount could have done would be to offer, well,
anything. Instead, we get just a theatrical trailer for Redux -- and
nothing else.

Closing Statement

Those unfamiliar with Apocalypse Now might want to start with the
traditional cut of the film, since the some of the new material in Redux
does tend to crowd the film with awkward moments even as it tries to embellish
further on the characters. Apocalypse Now does remain a powerful film in
either form, but I wish Paramount had done more than simply release this bare
bones. It may be pretentious and occasionally ponderous, but even in its
ultimate failure to really make a final judgment on Vietnam, it cannot be
faulted for a lack of ambition. And these days, when filmmaking ambition only
seems to extend as far as how many scenes can be turned into commercials for the
soundtrack album or the Lego set, Apocalypse Now Redux may be,
ultimately, the Coppola of old waging war against our very cultural
mythology.

The Verdict

Paramount is judged and found wanting. As for Coppola, it seems that time has
revealed his particular punishment for his ambitions: his work since this film
has been inconsistent at best. He is still clearly smarting from the wounds from
this film. Perhaps one day, he will come to terms with it. After all, there is
still a future in store for Apocalypse Now.